Kurt Vonnegut Quotes - Page 9

The thing about money is," said Ben, "you can't be polite to it. Leave something suspicious to say, and it'll say it...Leave something greedy to say, and it'll say it...Leave something scary to say, and it'll say it."
-"Money Talks

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it-love yourself

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was-if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

You got troubles, I got troubles-everybody's got troubles, whether they've got a lot of money or a little money or no money. When you get right down to it, I guess love and friendship and doing good really are the big things."
-"Money Talks

Money began talking to Ben again-not big money this time, but little money. It niggled and nagged and carped and whined at him, as full of fears and bitterness as a spinster witch.
-"Money Talks

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.

The mind reels.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you. - Dr. Hoenikker's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (in its entirety); chapter 5